This is the birthday of Abe Lincoln who saved the country. It’s our job to keep it safe. My message last week was that government is the key to minimizing world-wide genocide by climate change. And of course, this president is not helping. Now let’s talk about our role.

First, the strongest step we can take is to join organizations that are working to reduce climate change. We can’t turn the ship of state individually, but by joining together we can force government to change. We can force each of the political parties to make a major commitment to the war against climate change.

Second, push industry away from release of greenhouse gasses. One of the best incentives is a carbon tax and every delay in imposing it means the tax has to be exponentially larger. We can strengthen the push for a carbon tax by using our power as consumers.

Third, over the past half-century we have changed agriculture until it is now one of the biggest emitters of carbon and methane, the two principal climate damaging gasses. One of the most important changes is to shift away from beef and other meats. Think about how much carbon beef production releases – initially from the use of power to produce crops whose only purpose is to feed the cows, and then from all the carbon production involved in raising the animals and then the fact that the animals themselves produce huge quantities of methane. And that doesn’t include all the carbon and methane from the transportation of the animals and their feed and the fertilizers used in the process. Farming has gone from relatively clean half a century ago to a major problem now. So cutting down on beef is an important start.

Fourth, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on carbon emissions from transportation but, many of us can improve our health as well as the environment by walking, bicycling or using public transit. Growing up in New York City I had to be a public transit user. One of my happy memories of childhood is standing with my nose pressed against the front window of the front car of the subways and feeling the excitement from the sight and sounds of the train gobbling up miles of track in front of me. Later, I went to work by crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot. That gave me a gorgeous two-mile walk to work which was definitely good for my health. Coming to Albany, I wanted to get back to walking so we bought within a two mile circle around my office so I could, and did, walk to work. I fully understand the attractions of the countryside but there are huge advantages to city living, especially for the climate.

Fifth, many of us can make our homes much more efficient with insulation, solar panels and other energy saving methods. Reducing what we buy, recycling what we don’t need, and reusing what can be used again, use much less energy than buying and replacing.

Sixth, one step less talked about is passive solar. Zoning and housing codes would help, but windows facing due south get zero summer sun and maximize winter sun. Once the house is designed that way it pays dividends forever. Add a heat sink inside the house and it will spread the heat around the clock in cold weather.

I’ve added some articles and organizations you can look at on the text version of this commentary. But the point is to take action. We need action above all. It’s that or genocide by climate change.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about climate change. It’s a scary subject. Climate change is likely to injure and embitter people we care a lot about, our children and grandchildren – hurt them with disease, draught, famine, floods and storms, destroying their homes, houses and business too, indeed their towns and communities. That’s scary all right, but what do people do when they’re scared? Fight or flight? But where do you go? Unfortunately a lot of people do neither. They just can’t bear to think about it. But climate change will find them and their children and grandchildren anyway. What they don’t know will hurt.

Climate change is a big problem. The scale of the problem leads people acting individually to come up with platitudes like don’t cross that bridge ‘til we get there. Of course, the bridge won’t wait. If we don’t plan in advance it won’t be there when we want to cross it, and that’s not just a statement about infrastructure.

My hybrid and my solar panels make me and my family feel good but they only make a small dent – of course they’d make a bigger dent to the extent that the example catches on and government organizes a much bigger, more wide-scale reaction. That after all is what we’re trying to do. Our hybrids and solar panels are like very large lawn signs saying “Join us.” Like lawn signs, the signs don’t make the difference but the cultural statement that this is the right thing to do can carry the day.

That’s the kind of problem government is for, the kind of problem that is way beyond our abilities acting individually. Handling climate change requires coordination on a scale that only government can make happen. When government takes charge, those of us trying to do something about climate change become part of a powerful movement, not weaklings and suckers. Even the most ideological free marketeers have a name for situations where only government can solve the problem – they call it market failure.

Government will organize a powerful response when the people make clear with their votes that they demand action. It will happen when people see their personal welfare, not in opposing climate change, but in demanding that government direct opportunities to those whose livelihoods may be injured by efforts to fight climate change. It will happen when the rest of us understand that we are all in this together and demand that we all have to share the benefits and burdens. This is a war against forces that will destroy our families, our country and our world and it’s not a private opportunity to make big profits at everyone else’s expense. This is a shared problem, a shared opportunity and a shared job. In the past we’ve used an excess profits tax to share the burden of war. And to build the weapons of war we spread the factories all over the country.

We can be fair. We can protect and provide for each other. What we can’t be is cowards looking the other way.

As we gear up for the 2020 election, the politicians must declare what they will do to stop climate change from destroying us all. I know some relish the opportunity to be a war president, to be the great leader that pulls us from the brink of disaster. OK then, this is the war we have to fight. Now lead the charge.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, February 5, 2019.

With my grandchildren here, I’ve been slower getting my reading done, but they are also central to what we need to deal with. The entire NY Times Magazine of Sunday, August 5, was devoted to the story of climate change, when we knew it, what it would do, and our failure to stop it. Some of us have known for a long time without knowing how to ring the alarm bell. But there is no more time.

Within two decades the earth’s temperature will have risen enough to force a large portion of the earth, with its homes and cities under water. Don’t think you’re affected? A rise of 10-20 feet in the height of the oceans will swamp large portions of our coast – and forget about rebuilding like before. If you live above the sea line, it may not matter because much of the coastal infrastructure will be swamped. Roads, bridges, subways, pipelines and much more will become unusable. Our towns and cities won’t function like what brought us there.

Think it’s just the coasts? Actually, a large portion of the Midwest will be submerged. And a large portion of the Southwest will be a dust bowl, equally unusable. Worried about refugees? Much of our country will be refugees from the rising waters and the droughts caused by climate change. Feel secure in your property rights? Think about Sutter’s mill in California when gold was discovered. Large movements of people can swamp settled practices.

Where will your food come from? Rising, warming oceans threaten coral reefs and with them much of the global maritime food supply. Droughts and submerged land will reduce much earthbound food supplies. Still think this is a story about someone else? That you can pass on to your children and grandchildren the rising standard of living that is supposed to be the American dream?

Can we still stop it? Not if we fiddle while Rome burns or tweet while America disappears under water. This is a national and international crisis and it’s way more than politics. Yes, other nations have to get on board and many have but it destroys their efforts, achievements and resolve if America continues irresponsibly pumping CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. The battle against environmental devastation must be waged on a war footing, with everything at our disposal.

What will it take? More than your SUVs. Americans have been responding to cleaner power by buying more gas-guzzling cars and tools. At the very minimum we’ll have to accept a steep carbon tax, so that we can stanch the growing flood of energy use, even if we lower other taxes. We can’t keep fracking and building pipelines or mining coal – I understand the concern about jobs but we have to put our labor where it helps, not where it hurts. Global changes require global solutions that cut energy use and eliminate greenhouse gasses.

Retail suggestions can make some dents – like solar panels, green roofs, white roof tiles and white roads and drives. Cities are much more efficient than sprawling development, and multi-family homes are much more efficient than single-family dwellings because they insulate each other. Some building and zoning changes could push people to use passive solar to make the most of the sun’s heat in the winter and shield us from as much as possible in the summer. We have to start using our collective heads.

And we have to address this problem like an emergency that will require effort and sacrifice from all of us. Patriotism requires no less. Our families, children, grandchildren and everyone we hold dear require no less. This is a war for a livable environment. Losing it means losing everything, our country, our families, our homes and lives. Fussing about issues of heritage and color are the work of fools. Sweating about how much damage will take place by 2035 or whether catastrophe will take a few more years just makes it inescapable. We have serious work to do.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, August 21, 2018.

You’ll be subjected to rolling commentary on innumerable aspects of the Gorsuch hearings. I prefer, as I often do, to address deeper aspects of our competing value systems that underlie the surface of our political battles. One is the human impact of our treatment of planet earth.

Human behavior is injuring our environment. But nature has ways of winning the battle. It turns out that our fertility is as fragile as the eagles’ before DDT was banned, that endocrine disruptors and other environmental toxins are damaging our ability to reproduce – they’re in our kitchens, pesticides and other purchases.[1] That can be a powerful counterattack against the human activity that is warming the globe. If we become infertile and our population plummets, America will become a sad, lonely, vulnerable place, and, quite likely, conquered by any healthier peoples left.

Nevertheless, I’m sick of making consequential arguments, to tell people that if we don’t do this or that, bad things will happen. I think the arguments I’ve been making are air tight. But the science floats over people’s heads. A women, well-enough educated to know better, told me that she chose not to think about the environment because it was too big to deal with. Her comment made clear to me that reason doesn’t reach nearly enough people. Science won’t solve anything unless we accept and act on it.

So let’s address the moral issue. No one, no business, no company or corporation has the right to put toxins in the environment, chemicals that can make it impossible for people to reproduce or kill or maim those of us alive, or make us produce deformed and handicapped children – no one and no company has that right. And they don’t have the right to change the subject, throw smoke in our eyes, saying something else is the problem when they aren’t bothering to check. We’ve had enough lies. This is not a football game where deception is a winning strategy. In human life, deception is sinful, immoral, totally unacceptable. Taking risks with other people’s lives and making excuses for it is criminal.

If there is an economic problem, then, as many labor leaders have suggested for decades, let’s share the work, or create other jobs that don’t do damage – jobs aren’t an excuse for hurting people. Hurting people isn’t a job; it’s a crime. People aren’t entitled to work at criminal enterprises.

The Cabinet and the President and the Members of Congress and the state and local governments aren’t entitled to commit the crime of murder by poisoning the environment. Pro-lifers and liberals should be united on the environmental front given the enormity of the killing, of adults, children, fetuses and sperm. We’ve all seen multiple films with populations at risk and the starship or other craft working hard to prevent destruction of civilizations. The authors of those stories were trying to portray the immorality of destroying civilizations, and they were warning us of the likelihood that we would face that problem.

How many of us are moral enough to deal with this issue? Isn’t it criminal to support the rape of the air, land, food and water that give us life? Isn’t it criminal to carelessly poo-poo the dangers? How many of our corporate and elected officials are criminals?

Those with so little respect for the lives of fellow human beings must repent, stop and stop those who do, immediately and completely.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 21, 2017.

One of the major drivers of global warming is the greenhouse gases we emit by burning fossil fuels. Another major driver of global warming and one of the ways in which we are making our earth unsustainable for human life is the population explosion. When I was young the earth’s population was around 3 billion. It has more than doubled. When we talk about the growth of population, the crucial issue is about the time it would take to double. Population can double in as little as a generation. We are on the way to an earth with 12 billion people and counting. The devastation that is causing and will cause is incalculable and will make the earth inhospitable in short order, contributing to the overuse of water, the over fishing of the oceans, the deforestation of the jungles, the overuse of carbon based fuels even while we try to flush them out of the atmosphere and every other form of damage to the earth we depend on.

That makes population policy a tremendously important issue worldwide. Years ago we used to talk about ZPG, zero population growth. The idea had been talked about for centuries but a best-selling book, The Population Bomb, written by Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, helped make it a movement in 1968. Just a few years later, the movement was hijacked by the national battle over abortion. But population growth did not suddenly become unimportant. It remains at the root of the unsustainability of the world we inhabit.

We have a choice, we can curb the growth of population voluntarily, or an angry earth will do it to us, reducing our children and grandchildren to refugees, beggars, and marauders and leaving them to die of thirst and starvation or gasping for oxygen, if they are not killed by armed bands looking for the scraps of the earth.

Naysayers like to point out that Malthus’ prediction of worldwide starvation has not yet come true. But the evidence that Malthus’ prediction is coming true is all around us. Lands once fertile are becoming deserts. Trees once crucial to a sustainable atmosphere are being chopped down at alarming rates in the southern hemisphere with worldwide consequences. Fish stocks have been shrinking and even more important, the coral reefs that are at the base of the oceanic food chain are dying. May Malthus rest in peace, but we are seeing what he feared. Human beings have never been good at listening to prophets. Those of us living now can’t claim we were not warned. We can only claim that too many people scoffed as they scoffed at the prophets of old. The earth will have its revenge.

I do not want to treat abortion as part of this problem because it raises so many separate issues and debates. But I do want to treat almost every other method of birth control as very much part of the issue. Whatever your faith, we have an obligation to life, to treat our world with the respect it deserves. Religious proclamations about populating the earth made thousands of years ago have been accomplished, and must now be subordinated to religious and secular claims about life, about treating each other as required by the Golden Rule, about protecting the soil and the air and the water that give us all life. There is no escape from that injunction. Or the earth will have its revenge. Make sure the people you elect start protecting us from world-wide disaster.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 15, 2016.

I’d like to start by stating my pride in WAMC and admiration of you, the listeners and members, who not only raised funds to keep the station on the air but also raised funds during the pledge break for the food bank, to help refugees and to retire pollution from the environment. That’s a lot to be proud of.

Turning to the Middle East, Russia wants to beef up Assad in Syria. And Putin seems to have confronted us with a fait accompli as it conducts bombing raids. No one wants war with Russia. So what to do?

Lots of people have their eyes focused on the Middle East, on Syria and its immediate neighbors. I think that reveals inexperience. Foreign affairs is a chess game. Chess was invented to train the mind for combat.

Now I’m no champion chess player. Oh I like to brag that I once beat someone who beat Bobby Fisher, which is true, but my friend hadn’t played in years and I have no idea how old Fisher was when my friend beat him. But just the same I do understand some things about chess. And one of them is that if the other guy attacks one of my pieces where it’s hard to defend, I can look for ways to take advantage of the position somewhere else on the board. Sometimes that forces my opponent to release his grip while dealing with my counter threat, or provide me with a counter-balancing advantage. Chess is often described as a game of position, but rarely is it all about one square or even one piece.

So I’m wondering what candidates you might have for places to put pressure on Russia? Ukraine anyone? Or posting troops in Poland? And how about recalculating the effects of Putin’s moves? The EU has been falling apart but a resurgent Russian bear may help put the EU back together. Arab anger has been directed against home grown Sunni regimes and against the U.S., but a resurgent Russian bear may put them in a war with ISIS and could inflame Muslims within Russia. Conservatives want America to be a player in world politics. But being a player is hardly a purpose. I’m more focused on the consequences.

People who only keep their eyes on one spot may be experts on that spot, or just naïve. But real foreign policy is global. Russia is not invincible. Putin is not a magician. The games he has been playing have answers. Keep cool.

But don’t look for lots of loud talk back. Real warriors don’t scream their intentions. Intentions become known after the fact. That’s what I expect from Obama or any president who is competent in foreign policy and not a big gasbag. As Teddy Roosevelt once said, we need to speak softly and carry a big stick. But it’s also important to remember that big sticks aren’t best wielded in frontal attacks – Picket’s charge lost at Gettysburg. Grant, by contrast, was happy to lay siege at Vicksburg and Richmond, and the soldiers under Sherman rarely fired a shot through a long campaign across Tennessee and then Georgia – except when Jefferson Davis replaced one of his best generals and his replacement immediately attacked the portion of Sherman’s Army he had left behind at Chattanooga. The Confederate Army was then promply defeated by that half of Sherman’s Army.

Good soldiers know how to play chess.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, October 20, 2015.

I’d like to speak across the aisle. We have values in common even though we sometimes draw different conclusions. My point is simple. We are all against killing babies, their brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers. A religious revival in this country has focused on one form of what many consider baby-killing. There are, however, other ways of killing babies in unspeakable numbers.

Babies by the billions will be the first to die because manmade pollutants that change the climate will kill in innumerable and excruciating ways. That should be a cause that left and right, religious and nonreligious should join on, with passion, action, and dedication. Global warming and burning carbon fuels into greenhouse gasses should be the third rail of politics, an absolute no-no, IF we truly agree that killing billions of babies is a tragedy we cannot ignore, cannot be neutral about, must act about – unless we’re merely hypocrits. So I appeal to the religious right, and the religious left and all the rest of us, to all those who really care about babies and protecting them from killers, to stop the burning of carbon fuels into greenhouse gasses now.

Our babies will be the first to suffer as we lose our food sources. Burning carbon-based fuels acidifies the oceans, killing the reefs and much of the food we get from the sea. Burning carbon fuels into greenhouse gasses aggravates climate change, contributing to the extinction of the plants and animals we depend on for food as their climates disappear.

Our babies will be the first to suffer as we lose our water sources. Burning carbon fuels into greenhouse gasses aggravates the climate change that depletes the glaciers that feed the lakes, streams and rivers we depend on for water. And burning carbon fuels into greenhouse gasses aggravates climate change that contributes to the drought and the expansion of deserts that rob us of drinking water.

Our babies will be the first to suffer as unfamiliar diseases spread out of the tropics. Burning carbon fuels into greenhouse gasses aggravates climate change that brings tropical and hot weather illnesses to us.

Burning carbon fuels into greenhouse gasses aggravates climate change that takes our land as the sea encroaches on us, making refugees of families, mothers, fathers, babies and children.

Burning carbon fuels into greenhouse gasses aggravates climate change that adds to the violent storms that engulf cities, towns and villages all over the world including the U.S. where hurricanes and tornadoes have been striking with unaccustomed fury in places that seemed immune. As in all these tragedies the most vulnerable and first to die will be the babies and children.

In each case, the most vulnerable to the disease, drought, storms and starvation will be the babies. Who then are the baby-killers? Who wants to authorize pipelines that make it easier for millions of gallons to flow to be burned? Who wants to drill, baby, drill? Who opposes every measure to add to carbon neutral sources of power like wind and solar? Who are the baby killers? Would you support and vote for baby killers?

Really, let’s by all means talk about killing babies. Yours, mine, our children’s babies. Global warming does not distinguish by faith, color, ethnicity, or gender. It is and will be an equal opportunity killer. So let’s show some real heart and understand this is the number one threat to infants all over the world, and their brothers and sisters, parents, and the rest of us.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, February 10, 2015.